I know of the ancient grammarians and I ought to think they suffice, but really what I hunger for are treatises in the vein of Plato's Cratylus, I think. Long-winded essays on the nature of language, preferably.

timeodanaos wrote:I know of the ancient grammarians and I ought to think they suffice, but really what I hunger for are treatises in the vein of Plato's Cratylus, I think. Long-winded essays on the nature of language, preferably.

The Stoics are the go-to guys for that sort of thing. As usual, I think we only have fragments and quotations.

Panini wasn't long-winded, though. He'd be a lot easier if he were a little less terse.

There's some very complex thinking about language and knowledge in the Pali canon, but I don't know anything about post-Paninian language theorizing.

The differences between Indian grammarians and the Greek ones is, though the Indians tried to describe precisely the language and understand its rules and how it goes developments, the Greeks tried to create simplifications and went so far as to force the use of those simplified rules the way they thought people should do. I know, I am oversimplifying the situation, but still I think I am to the point.

ThomasGR wrote:The differences between Indian grammarians and the Greek ones is, though the Indians tried to describe precisely the language and understand its rules and how it goes developments, the Greeks tried to create simplifications and went so far as to force the use of those simplified rules the way they thought people should do.

Which Indian grammarians were these? Even the word we use to name the language â€” Sanskrit: completed, perfected â€”Â betrays its scholastic nature. Panini's grammar is quite as proscriptive and artificial as any atticist manual belched up by the Second Sophistic.

I was thinking of Panini, and the history of Indian grammar schools. How the need arose for these rules, the interpretation of old Vedic texts. Greeks of those times tried only to unify the dialects, which lead to the development of the Koine.

annis wrote:Panini wasn't long-winded, though. He'd be a lot easier if he were a little less terse.

It is said that being able to reduce a sutra with even an ardha matra (half the measure of time to pronounce a short a) gives the sutrakara (author of the sutra) as much happiness as the birth of a baby boy. There is a good reason for being terse, in the old days students had to commit the entire ashtadhyayi to memory.

There's some very complex thinking about language and knowledge in the Pali canon, but I don't know anything about post-Paninian language theorizing.

Perhaps you have figured this out already, since this post was made several years ago. There is a philosophical school of grammarians, one important figure in this tradition was Bhartrihari: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bhartrihari/